COLUMN: Not In Kansas Anymore

From Tim Zeigler's "Turn Your Head and Cough," Fall '94 Some fairly exceptional measures of prevention and deterrence are undertaken to avoid being victimized. Activities are restricted to daylight hours or unnaturally large numbers of people. Key chains are hung with designer canisters of pepper spray. Some students even feel compelled to keep loaded guns by their bedsides. These decisions and how to exercise them fall to the individual judgments of each of us. The University shoulders some responsibility for our safety through the support of the Escort Service and the Residential Living security guards. Respectively, these services try to comprehensively address the needs of students for safe transportation and security within University residences. They rely on paid employees with limited training to operate within established procedures to maintain the safety of their charges and themselves. These people are not equipped with firearms. They are not trained (nor paid) to routinely risk their lives by directly intervening on our behalf. They are armed only with the established procedures and their own judgment. Recently, two incidents were described on Page Six that demonstrated the limited effectiveness of any service to completely ensure our constant protection, regardless of adherence to established policies. In the first incident, a student complained that at 2:30 a.m., he and a friend were subjected to considerable harassment and potential harm by two homeless individuals outside of High Rise East. The student felt the threat was unnecessarily prolonged by the refusal of security staff to admit them to the safety of the lobby, as per the policy that closes access at 1:00 a.m. to non-residents of the building. So, in this case, the judgment of security to strictly adhere to policy was the scapegoat for all the resulting badness. On one hand, I can see his point. To be separated from perceived sanctuary by a guard's refusal to unlatch the door would be a wee-bit maddening to anyone -- student, citizen, baby harp seal, whatever... I am curious as to the guard's motivation to make that decision. Was he merely being an anal retentive stickler for detail with regards to policy, or was it a perfectly sensible fear of the people outside the door? The distinction is not trivial, especially in light of the potential consequences of the seemingly sensible action of opening the door. What if the two aggressors, by sheer stealth or the threat of a newly revealed weapon, had followed the students through an opened door? Now these unarmed security guards would have exposed everyone in the building to possible harm by deviating from policy. Nobody wants to be the poor bastard stuck outside the fort. Having made many similar bone-headed, late night forays into the campus and city, I sympathize. But each time I go, I acknowledge that I could easily end up quite dead or at least sporting the very latest fashion in a colostomy bag. As the saying goes, boys, we reap what we have sown. At the very least, you should take responsibility for being out at 2:30 in the morning and not calling ahead to the intended victim of your visit. Talk about ridiculous policies... In the second incident involving safety concerns, an Escort rider decries a driver's decision to stop for an individual who had hailed the van from the curb. Apparently deviating from established procedure, this move enabled a man who "was a disgruntled ex-employee of the University" and admittedly on drugs, to enter the vehicle and engage in some unnerving, if not threatening, behavior. After a few blocks and a few minutes, the driver was able to get rid of this passenger without major incident, but the outcome was in considerable doubt at times. The writer of the letter was perhaps appropriately outraged that this cavalier exercise in judgment by the driver had endangered her own well-being, the very entity that Escort was established to protect. If her portrayal is indeed accurate, a considerable degree of threat was unnecessarily incurred. In defense of the driver, however, it is easy to imagine at least one scenario where his decision could have been life-saving. What if the person hailing the van had been a University student fleeing an attack, such as the one that took the life of Al-Moez Alimohamed earlier this year? In such a case, sticking to procedure could easily miss an opportunity to save a life. So what's the point? Policies are written, procedures are followed, and systems are in place. But all these things can not be more safely effected by unthinking machines. They require a human element which consequently introduces individual judgment (or its lack) into the equation. Quite frankly, all the king's men can not save us from our own piss-poor judgment. If the Secret Service can not prevent the occasional "walk-by shooting" of the White House by deranged tourists, we can hardly expect the staff of Residential Living and Escort to make all the bad people leave us alone. It is not unreasonable, however, to insist that they do their job. Sometimes staff will stick to policy that works against us. Sometimes they will exercise judgment that endangers us. It's the nature of life. You occasionally have to make the command decision. Sometimes you're the hometown hero, sometimes you screw the pooch. It ain't right. It ain't fair. Nobody ever said it was. And to make ourselves feel better, we will travel in groups, carry our mace, and finger our triggers in bed at night. Roll your dice, move your mice. Tim Zeigler is a fourth-year medical student from Williamsport, Pennsylvania. Turn Your Head and Cough appears alternate Wednesdays.